The five millionth milestone record entered into the Gateway from the University of Hawaii at Manoa

10 December 2010

The five millionth milestone record, from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM) Library’s Digital Collections and Repository Program, was recently entered into WorldCat via the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway.

A Web-based, self-service tool, the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway makes it possible for any institution with an OAI-compliant repository to self-harvest the metadata of their unique digital content to WorldCat to gain broader visibility.

The five millionth milestone record, ‘Greengold’ – A Late Season Avocado, provides a link to a Hawai‘i Cooperative Extension Service’s commodity fact sheet that was written by R. A. Hamilton in 1993. The record can be viewed at http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/651068813

The record, ‘Greengold’ – A Late Season Avocado, is made available by UMH Library’s Digital Collections and Repository Program. The program encompasses the two repositories at the Library - ScholarSpace and eVols, both built on the DSpace platform, a Web Archiving program, as well as 50 digitized special collections that focus on historical and cultural materials.

“We maintain an e-mail account for the repositories and through this we receive numerous appreciative comments thanking us for making these resources available. We also receive requests asking for help in trying to provide any contact information for users attempting to reach some of our researchers. It’s great to receive these types of messages as we know that others are finding the research conducted here useful,” said Beth Tillinghast, the UMH Library’s Web Support Librarian and Institutional Repository Project Manager.

In order to make the metadata for items in the repository available for OAI harvesting, the UMH Library uses Qualified Dublin Core (QDC) and follows the guidelines outlined by the Digital Library Federation Aquifer Project.

“From the beginning stages of repository development, we have insisted that the metadata schema must be OAI compliant. It has always been important to us that our repositories should be harvested,” Tillinghast explains.

Additionally, she notes that the UMH repositories are promoted via workshops and presentations on scholarly communication topics and open access celebrations and presentations. And she participates in the DSpace Global Outreach Committee, which is a group of volunteers who work to identify and develop resources and tools for DSpace users.

As is stated in its mission, the UMH Library’s Digital Collections and Repository Program strives to build distinctive and unique Hawaiian, Pacific and Asian collections for the benefit of all. To learn more about this program, visit http://guides.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/dcarp